Hello an update from the shed. Let's head inside and the first thing I should probably explain is this shelf which was hastily erected with bits of off cuts of wood during the winter because one of the problems is that water condenses up on the roof panels on the underside of the roof panels. It's not a leak, it's just condensation. And in the days where it was going below zero at night and above zero in the day that would turn to ice overnight and that would accumulate quite large buildups of ice on the underside of here and that was dripping down on my electronics.

and you can probably see around the switches here. there is corrosion and that's because if you put water on a circuit board that has voltage on it, you're going to start to electrolyze the water and all the salts come out and it all turns into a bit of a nasty mess. It will eat away the metal eventually. Thank you! So this system is still working.

Uh, we've got a battery here made up of oh, eight times. four isn't it? So 32 of those six amp power lithium ion phosphate cells. Uh, there's a VMS that's just doing basic over voltage and under voltage protection. Solar comes in here from the solar panel through these bulbs which are all in parallel.

They act as a current limiter to limit the maximum power that can come in from the solar panel and then at a certain voltage and it's 28 volts on here. This switch is on and then through this Buck converter it Powers up this ant Miner and that's actually running at the moment. so that will run for a few hours on the energy that's in those batteries now. I've moved the 240 watt panel into the position between the two wooden posts and you can probably see that I'm planning to put in a third post here and then that means I've got a place to put the 325 watt panel and I was thinking what do I do with these panels? Just put them in parallel but then that takes the maximum current from.

Well, it's 10 amps on the black panel. There's about eight amps on there that takes you up to 18 amps and 18 amps coming in from the solar panel means I'd have to reevaluate the current limiter there I'd Have to think about the wiring, the interconnects the BMS rating. I Think this is good for 20 amps in 40 amps out. Uh, the cells.

What the maximum charge current is. They're six amp hours. If I put 18 amps into these, these would be charging at 3C I Don't even know whether they're suitable for charging at 3C So what I've decided to do for that second solar panel is actually to build a second battery. So I bought some more of these 6 amp hour cells.

They're not massively expensive. Um, I'll put another active balancer on. this one's got that eight-way active balancer literally just suspended on top of the cell array. here.

another BMS which I've got and so build a second battery Bank and then I could put in a second relay, butt converter and another ant liner. I've got more of those things down here so I could do that. But what I'm actually planning to do is on the Shelf over there which is currently just storing all these uh boxes full of electronics, bits and pieces. Um, put some bigger lithium-ion phosphate batteries which I bought a couple of years ago big Prismatic ones which are sort of um, cuboid shape and then transfer the energy from these packs once they fill up into that other bigger pack and then run ant miners off that when that one fills up.

and my idea is to transfer energy from these smaller packs using boost and then Buck converters into the bigger pack. So how have these cells done? Um, well, pretty good. They've probably had I don't know. two to three hundred charge and discharge cycles and if you treat these gently and I'm well, I'm I'm charging them at I Check.

Also, this isn't six amperses, it is six amp hours with four in parallel. So it's 24 amp hours. Is the capacity of this? Um, yes, if you charge this gently, certainly it's charging at a C, right? Well, less than one and I'm only charging up to 28 volts. You can divide that by 8 to find out what the that cell voltage is and I'm going down I think to 23 volts.

So I'm not using the full uh range of these cells. I'm not pushing them right to the upper voltage and right to the lower voltage. and I imagine I'll get thousands of Cycles out of them. So those are my plans for what's going to happen in the modular shed and in respect of these solar panels outside.

And then if you want to see more about how I built this shed, I do have a another Channel with all the information uh, all the videos about me building it on that channel I'll put links in the description below but let's take a look at the cycling of those cells now. I don't have any data logging for uh, voltage and current and that sort of stuff. but I do have data logging from the running of the ant Miner because you that cryptocurrency Miner mines into a pool and this is the pool I use and these are the last few days of uh, cryptocurrency earnings I mean it is only you know Five? Six cents per run and recently I've swapped to the smaller solar panel uh with the bigger solar panel the 325 watt. Uh, if I wind this back a bit, you can see that these Peaks were a bit higher.

It would do eight or nine cents on sunny days. But if you look at the total amount of mining I've done, which is probably about that, these are the individual runs um, uh, well, cycles of that battery if you like. So every time that battery gets up to 28 volts. I do a mining run and these are the mining runs and you can see this goes back to March the first last year.

So that's a year and two months, so what's that? that must be getting on close for 400 days Now of course, in the winter you see that they're fairly sparsely. Uh, the runs are fairly sparsely spaced because there's very little Sun the day is very short and so I think the maximum number of days between runs can be something like seven or eight days where nothing happens. Well, the battery is being charged, but it's accumulating charge very slowly. But in the summer you get uh runs every day.

Some of the time, occasionally it'll skip a day if the battery never gets quite fully charged. Um, during the day and then of course night, it's not being charged. There is a gap here in the summer. This was July last year and this is where I switched the system off for a few days because we were having that 40 degree heat wave and it was something like 50 degrees in the shed and I just thought everything's getting too hot.

Um so I shut it down for a few days. but uh yeah, this shows how many times I've cycled those batteries and uh, here's just a sneak peek at some of these new cells I've bought. they're a different color. they're just sort of silver colored these ones but these again are six amp hour lithium ion phosphate.

They're 32 650s so they're 32 millimeters diameter, 65 millimeters long I don't think that includes the studs I've got some more of these coming I've got the cell holders which, oh uh, those things and so I will be building another battery pack soon. but that's uh, the update on the uh battery charging and crypto mining operation in the shed. Uh, so Cheerio!.